


Another Quinn Fabray

by thetimesinbetween



Category: Glee
Genre: (or rather the aftermath of said assault), Aftermath of Violence, Depression, Mental Health Issues, Other, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:31:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetimesinbetween/pseuds/thetimesinbetween
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta!fic on Kitty Wilde, because why not. Spoiler alert: Kitty Wilde isn't another Quinn Fabray. For reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Quinn Fabray

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this photoset of Kitty (http://thetimesinbetween.tumblr.com/post/50695990198). Also inspired by there not being enough meta/fic about Kitty around.

Kitty Wilde could have been another Quinn Fabray. 

But Kitty Wilde doesn’t get to look forward to a purity ball. Her parents and peers never get a chance to look at her as though she were on a pedestal. 

She is off the pedestal. The pedestal is smashed to bits. She is very small. She is a twelve-year-old desperately trying to burn a nonflammable sleeping bag in the middle of the night, out back. She gets caught by her father. 

She doesn’t have a lot of dignity left. 

She’d only had her period once before it happened. 

Kitty admits that she’s dealt with all of it—the loss of her friends, of her parents’ unmarred pride, of her whole way of living really—in strange ways. Mostly she acts—acts ridiculous, acts angry, acts out. Acts like she has everything figured out. Acts like she doesn’t care. 

It takes surprisingly little effort. 

It takes much less effort than figuring out how to stop acting.

Not acting would involve knowing who exactly she is now. How does Kitty Wilde act? How does Kitty Wilde think? And no, she doesn’t buy into that whole used-up-chewing-gum, unsticky-tape crap. She doesn’t think she’s worthless or some shit. (Okay, occasionally she thinks she’s worthless but generally she is fine, she is just fine so back off.) The trouble is she really doesn’t know—without her friends, without her brilliant Quinn Fabray II plan, who is she? Because that was all she really had going for her, before. She takes a stab at the other thing she could potentially have going for her, i.e. her parents’ literally crazy brand of Christianity, early in the semester. It doesn’t work out. 

So that’s how it is: she wants to be herself. She’s pretty sure. That’s like the one thing teenagers are supposed to do, other than not getting pregnant, right? (Right.) But who is she? She knows the acting isn’t her; she knows she has to look from before she started acting all the time so, okay, pre-sexual assault. That means, what, the first few months of middle school? But…she wasn’t herself in middle school—was she? Freaking no one is themself in middle school. Where should she look, then? Herself as a five year old, unspoiled by all the shit that she’d dealt with since then? Fuck that.

Sometimes she goes into her closet to pick out clothes for the weekend, and she asks herself, Kitty, what do you want to wear? And a few minutes later she is laying on the floor in her closet and telling herself: Kitty. Be yourself. Be yourself, Kitty, that’s all you have to do. That’s the one thing you have to do. What do you want to wear, Kitty? Kitty? She lays there for an hour or two and she doesn’t know what she’s doing but she can’t convince herself to move at all and when her mom calls her for dinner she splashes cold water on her face and goes downstairs like nothing is wrong. 

She doesn’t really realize until later—until she becomes sort-of-actual-friends with Marley, until after the shooting, until after sophomore year, when she has a little space to walk around her old neighborhood alone where nobody looks twice at her, when she doesn’t have to be anybody in particular if she doesn’t want, when she can just breathe—she doesn’t realize that she isn’t finding anything underneath all that acting because…there’s nothing to find, really. Like, okay, there’s stuff in there, in her brain—of course there’s stuff, she has a past. She has a past, that’s the problem. But—and one day she’s circling her block and there, it bubbles to the surface, just like that—but there’s no point trying to get back to before. She can’t erase it. She can’t bleach it out. She can’t ignore it. 

She has to go forward. 

And that’s it. 

So, okay, bad news, she can’t just press reset and pretend she wasn’t assaulted. 

Good news, she doesn’t have to know who she is. She gets to make it up. Every day. 

Every day.

Sometimes that sounds exhausting. Sometimes it sounds…really good. Choice is good. 

Regardless, it’s the only good way to go, so she’s going. Every day, she’s going. Up up up. 

And at some point she lets go of the old dream. She is never going to be Quinn Fabray. She is going to be Kitty Wilde. And today she thinks: Kitty Wilde is going to be fucking great.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think! I enthusiastically accept flailing, comments, essays, incoherent sleep deprived ramblings....


End file.
